The first twelve hours at the maternity desk are free, and their use is recorded. Thursday recurs in renewals, queues and the wing’s agreed arrangements. Those repeated days do not prove that every story shares a single synchronized calendar.
In Stimulus, the window from three to four in the morning returns every fourteenth. Service Improvement places a withheld hour beside statements about it. In The Last Word, the turn of the year carries a changed fare into an announcement. The collection contains long histories, repeated cycles and a change of year. It is not all confined to one year.